radio cegeste performs expanded cinema iteration of "study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware)"
study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware) was a work initially made under the auspices of the Cities and Memory Polar Sounds project, which involved selected artists taking a single sound from the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research, and artistically interpreting this under the umbrella theme of Anthropogenic Climate Change.
study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware) extends and is very much indebted to sounds, methods, and ideas that emerged through the two-year research process of the site-specific collaborative group composition Nocturne: Sonic Migrations (created with Dani Kirby, Matt Warren and Eliza Burke) that was performed on the Hobart/nipaluna waterfront in February 2022. It's a small solo coda to this more extensive project, that also has a lot of relation to prior work I've made on pelagic themes, such as The New Zealand Storm Petrel EP released as part of Flaming Pines 'Birds of a Feather' series almost a decade ago.
I wrote some notes for the composition:
---
study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware) uses Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research library sound #044 ("Seismic airgun: close take") as the basis of a composition that explores the phenomenon of seismic shooting for oil exploration, and the link to both whale beaching (via sonic disorientation of finely-tuned Cetacean communicative channels) and Anthropogenic Climate Change through the phenomenon of undersea oil and gas extraction. In the process, the piece draws on longer histories of the mediation of the oceanic environment by anthropogenic sound, a cultural development itself arguably indebted to the extraordinary communicative and navigational abilities of Cetacean interaction within the different ecology of this medium/media, inhabiting a sphere (sense of planet) that sees them use the ocean like a telephone or a shortwave radio, a non-human cultural practice that pre-dates the European experimental investigation of radio waves, sonar, radar, etc, by millions of years.
In addition to the use of sound #044, which can be heard as a dull, monotonous distant thud throughout the piece, source material for "study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware)" includes ocean field recordings made at Taroona and Verona Sands on the coast of lutruwita/Tasmania, a region that has seen several unprecedented mass whale strandings in recent years, the most recent of which, resulting in the deaths of over 200 pilot whales, occurring while the piece was being composed. Instrumentation includes accordion and zither recordings that have been harnessed to provide a range of textures and tones, partially in the service of mimicking polar natural Geophonic phenomena such as sea ice and aurora "natural radio" sounds, as well as Anthropophonic/Anglo-Western cultural sounds such as the creaking hulls of 19th century ships. Several recordings made at the offices of TMR (Tasmanian Maritime Radio), the state's official Coast Radio Service, whose services routinely include providing a listening watch on VHF and HF distress and calling channels, pay homage to the state's pioneering (1911–1914) Antarctic radio link, established when Radio was still a new technology. Other source sounds from the artist's extensive physical record library of the mediated history of anthropogenic ocean sounds, and related cultural material, include a recording of a Sofar (Sound fixing and Ranging) bomb and other demonstrations of undersea communications audio from the 1968 album "Sound in the Sea" produced by the Electro Marine Sciences Division of Marine resources, and the run-out grooves of a 78rpm recording of the song "Asleep in the deep" recorded in 1913 by Wilfred Glenn and the Victor Orchestra.
This last record's refrain "many great hearts are asleep in the deep, so beware, beware..." is the key to the title of the piece, which is a reference to a report of the stranding of a massive white sperm whale, washed up on the black sands of Whatipu, a remote beach on the west coast of the Auckland Region in the North Island of New Zealand in 1861. Local Māori, who in their role as kaitiaki (guardians of the land, sea and sky), had arrived to greet the whale, reported that on the second night of their stay, the whale gave an enormous groan, then spoke to them. The creature said, “Kia tūpato” ("beware"). These indigenous guardians, believing the giant, ancient, battle scarred whale, that had over 20 harpoons embedded in its flesh, had prophesied the end of the world, and that death and destruction were coming, immediately put a rāhui (a form of tapu) on its carcass, but this wasn't respected by a group from Auckland Museum, who arrived to remove its gigantic teeth and 10 of the harpoons, mutilating its carcass in the process. Some sources say this ancient sperm whale's beaching on an Auckland shore may have been the last resting place of the whale that earlier inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a story that remains as tantalising as it is potentially fanciful. What perhaps remains pertinent, on the other hand, are the whale's apocalyptic predictions, that continue their relevance in a world where nations are still intent on mining fossil fuels for profit, endangering not only themselves but the less culpable, including indigenous cultures and the nonhuman, and indeed all life on earth.
---
